The Meta

HP COE of SOA and testing

HP has announced further commitment to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with new consulting services and software that draw heavily on its acquisition of Mercury Interactive last year.

At a press conference, the company outlined its strategy to manage the IT operations that underpin a service-oriented architecture (SOA), a modular system design to bring business applications on-line faster.

With an SOA, a company creates services, such as network authentication or customer look-up, that can be used in different situations. With these pre-built services in place, businesses should be able to roll out new applications faster by combining existing services.

HP’s products focus on establishing rules, or governance, for using those services, as well as testing services and managing the data centres that run them.

Also on Monday, HP announced it has more closely integrated testing and governance software from Mercury Interactive with its long-held line of management software.

Thomson Financial said the governance tools allow the financial services firm to have one person, rather than more than 20 people, manage the process of introducing services.That means the company can bring products to market in hours versus weeks, which was “a huge ROI (return on investment) for us,” said Vladimir Mitevski, vice president of product management for core services at Thomson Financial.

HP executives also detailed enhancements to the company’s Systinet registry, which gives users more detailed controls for approving the use of services.

There is a module for software testing services and simulating the impact of changes through a Web-based testing product that doesn’t require writing code, according to HP executives.

HP also beefed up its consulting with a “centre of excellence” in which HP consultants will work with SOA architects at corporations.